It s hard to say good bye
by FromAnotherWorld
Summary: Lucy comes home from school and finds her mother dying on the ground


Takes place when Lucy is about 11 years old.

_**It´s hard to say good bye**_

As Lucy was on her way home from school she was absolutely sure it´d be a great day. She had just got the results of her maths test and felt so happy she practically ran home as soon as she had got off the bus. She knew her mother would be really proud of her and congratulate her for how well she had done.

As an only child Lucy was a little spoiled in the way that she always needed to be the center of everyones attention and that every of her little successes had to be seen as a great achievement but she really was trying hard to do everything to make her parents proud of her.

And today she felt as if it would be the happiest day of this school year. After having had a really disappointing D in her previous maths test she now was especially proud of her A and knew her mother would be as well.

Of course her mother never was angry when Lucy came home with marks that didn´t meet her own expectations but always tried to console her daughter and tell her that she had been good but just not very lucky and that there would always be a next test where she could do better but she was always smiling so brightly at her when Lucy jumped into her arms after school rejoicing and telling her of her day.

Yes, Lucy was absolutely sure it´d be a great day... until she reached her house.

Beaming with happiness the girl run into the hall calling: "Mom! Mom! I got an A! I got an A! Mom!"

Usually her mother would have come out of the kitchen now calling: "Great!" and a few more things embracing her daughter listening to every word Lucy would say telling her just how well she had done and that she was really happy about Lucy´s success, but not today.

"Mom, I got an A!" Lucy repeated starting to feel a little confused and a bit worried. "Mom?!"

No answer. But on Wednesdays her mom had always been at home when she had come home from school waiting for her with lunch. "Mom?" the little girl repeated but again there was no answer.

This indeed was strange. Something made Lucy feel very uneasy. As she went on there was a strange fear inside her heart but she couldn´t tell what she was afraid of until she reached the kitchen.

As Lucy saw her mother she forgot to breathe and felt as if her heart had stopped beating. Her body froze and she simply stared at her mother uncomprehending of how a great day could turn into the most frightening thing she had ever seen within the fraction of a second.

There wasn´t a single thought on the girl´s mind as she stared at her mother´s body lying on the floor and violently shaking in convulsions. All that was left was shock and a fear she didn´t understand and in just a second so many pictures, memories and feelings flashed through her mind she felt as if the ground under her feet was gone and she´d fall into an endlessly deep abyss.

Lucy had known that her mother wasn´t healthy she just never had truly realized what this meant. After all she had always seemed to be happy and had tried to hide the weakness and tiredness she had often felt to spare her daughter the awareness of how close the end really was but now it struck Lucy once of a sudden and all the pictures flashed trough her mind where her mother had suddenly seemed to be in pain or not to realize what was going on around her but then she´d always smile at Lucy and tell her it was all right and Lucy would believe it.

But not today. Today her mother didn´t smile. Today she was lying on the ground her entire body being contorted with convulsions her eyes turned into the inside of her head and her chest going up and down in strenuous tries to breathe.

Everything seemed to be turning. Lucy´s vision blurred as tears came to her eyes. "MOOOM!" she cried and threw herself to the ground next to her mother.

Streams of desperate tears rolled down the girl´s cheeks as she looked into her mother´s agonized face trying to find any of the soft and warm expressions she knew so well but it was as if her mother was already gone no longer able to realize what was going on around her maybe no longer knowing she even existed.

"MOOOM! MOOOM!" Lucy screamed in overwhelming panic and despair. Sobs shook the little girl´s body and a completely alien pain spread out from her heart that seemed to be ripped in millions of pieces.

Lucy gasped for breath screaming in pain. She was breathing far too deep and far too fast between her screams and yet she felt as if suffocating. "MOOM! NOOO! MOOM WAKE UP! PLEASE WAKE UP!" The girl desperately tried to shake her mother, to wake her up from this nightmare, to somehow get her attention, to make her look like the woman she used to be. "Please, say something, mom. Please, say anything." the girl sobbed feeling her mother´s twitching body in every futile attempt to calm her.

She was so desperate, so helpless, powerlessly watching her mother´s throes of death wishing she could help her anyhow but she felt she was just a bystander unable to affect the situation even unable to be heard by her dying mother.

"HELP!" Lucy called her voice distorted with uncontrolled sobs. "PLEASE, ANYONE!" But no one replied to her desperate screams. "Mom." Tears kept falling down from Lucy´s eyes soaking the shirt of her mother as her hands were brushing through the still soft and familiar fur of her face.

"Can anyone hear me?! Please help me!" Lucy´s voice broke and she let her head sink onto her mothers shoulder holding her hand. She could slowly feel her mother´s breath calm down, grow weaker and Lucy´s sobs did too. "Mum, please wake up. I need you. You can´t just die." she pleaded knowing her words would stay unheard. "You can´t die. You can´t leave us alone. Dad and I need you, we need you so much."

At that moment the only thing she knew was that she couldn´t take her mother´s death and it was the first time she truly knew how unbearably much she loved her and she felt she couldn´t live without hearing her soft voice when she woke her up in the morning, without her hugging her and wishing her a nice day when she left in the morning, without her smiling at her, without her happy face, without her comforting her and being there for her, without her taking care of her and without her loving her.

Lucy heard steps behind her, voices but they made no sense. She knew there was someone and she hoped for help and yet all she could do was hold onto her mother fearing she would lose her forever if she let go of her. "Help, please help." the girl repeated burying her face even deeper in her mother´s shoulder.

Her breath was calm now, too calm. Her body no longer shook but lay limply on the ground. She seemed peaceful now, completely at ease. In a way it was easier seeing her like that just one step from death than seeing her body contort in agony but it also tore Lucy´s heart apart as she kept weeping her eyes burning like hell with white flames dancing in front of her vision each time she opened her eyes.

The world was very small now and growing colder. Nothing but Lucy and her mother lying on the ground existed anymore, nothing that would have been of any importance and Lucy tried to hold onto every moment as long as possible not to let it slip away and with it her mother´s life but she couldn´t stop time from passing nor could she delay her mother´s death.

"I need you, please stay with me." she whispered into her mother´s ear her voice sounding pained and hopeless. Her fingers softly brushed through the fur of her mother´s hands and she knew she´d remember this feeling forever. It was soft and warm and painful.

A hand touched Lucy from behind but she cried out and shook it off pressing her body tighter against her mother´s. Voices tried to talk to her but she didn´t understand, didn´t want to understand. She could hardly sense her mother´s breath anymore. Her body was limp as if all life was already gone. She felt so lonely and it hurt so much, beyond anything she could have imagined would exist.

Lucy didn´t realize how much time passed or if any passed at all as sirens grew audible. There was a faint desperate glow of hope inside her trembling heart but she could feel that her mother´s was hardly beating anymore. Lucy felt her mother´s chest move once more and then everything was completely silent apart from her own sounds, the sirens and the people around her.

Lucy held her breath, listening closely. A cold awareness gripped the girls heart as she listened for her mother´s heartbeat and heard nothing but her own. "MOM! NO! MOM!" she screamed shaking her mother to wake her up but even though her mind refused to comprehend a low voice in the back of her head told her that it was over. "You have to wake up! PLEASE!" she cried in utter despair refusing to give up a lost battle.

She only vaguely realized more people enter the room, busy and in a hurry. Her world was turning too fast and blurring in front of her eyes fading into a mass of colors that once had a meaning. Hands gripped her and pulled her away from her mother´s limp body. Lucy screamed in fear and kicked around. She didn´t want to let go of her mother; she didn´t want to lose her for she knew if she let go now it´d be forever.

Someone pulled her away from the rabbit that was peacefully lying on the ground holding two fingers to her neck and waiting for a moment. For another moment Lucy kept struggling to pull free while the people who had entered repeatedly pressed onto her mother´s chest in short intervals but her mother´s body stayed limp and no life returned to her eyes. A couple of times electrical shocks shook her mother´s body but each time she motionlessly fell to the ground as they ended.

It was a picture she´d never be able to forget again. Lucy screamed words she couldn´t hear kicked around and tried to run to her mother unable to tell what she was doing. All she knew was that she needed to help her mother even though there no longer was a thing anyone could do.

"Time of death 15:34" a voice said in a completely factual tone and Lucy felt her legs give away. She limply sank into the arms of whoever was holding her covering her face in her arms.

xxx

It was the day after Vivian Hare´s funeral. To Lucy it seemed as if her mother´s death was an eternity ago and at the same time as if no time at all had passed since then.

She was sitting on a small bridge on the edge of the forest staring into the slowly flowing water of a stream. It had gotten warmer in the last days and the ice and snow had molten but Lucy was freezing inwardly.

She could still remember her mother´s face as if she had seen her only a moment ago but sometimes she found it hard to see her exact smile in front of her and at those moments she feared to forget her and in a way it felt as if she was losing her once more.

Lucy had been very quiet since her mother had died. She was still trying to comprehend and sorting her memories. Right now she did so staring into the water trying to find her mother´s face in the reflexions.

Even though she hadn´t been ablt to remember for many years she now knew how the end had begun. It had been about five years ago when her mother had suddenly felt ill. Lucy had thought she had just caught a cold and hadn´t really been worried about her but one day her father had taken her to hospital.

Lucy however hadn´t understood what this meant and also as a nurse had taken care of her while the doctors had been talking to her mother and her father she hadn´t realized anything was wrong. She had only been a little confused as her father had taken her back home with a strange expression on his face she had never seen on his before. Her mother however had had to stay in hospital for a few more days.

"What´s wrong with mom?" Lucy had wanted to know and her dad had explained to her that her mother had a very weak heart but Lucy hadn´t believed him. "But she loves us so much. Her heart can´t be weak. She got the strongest heart I know." Lucy had tried to convince her father who had weakly smiled at her and said: "Yes, she loves us so much and we love her."

And then a few days later her mother had come home and everything had seemed to be absolutely normal to Lucy so she had almost forgotten about this incident within a few weeks. Her mother had seemed happy, healthy and had always been there for Lucy and Lucy being the naive child she had been had believed this was how it would be for all eternity. But she had been wrong, so terribly wrong.

As she thought of it again tears started to roll down her cheeks and fell into the water. Whimpering quietly the girl closed her eyes imagining her mother´s face. There were so many happy memories she associated with her but even those hurt now and there was this one memory Lucy just couldn´t bear.

She now knew her mother had always tried to make her be as happy as possible. Therefore she had always pretended to be fine even if she had felt weak or in pain. She had always smiled and pretended to be happy even if she had known she had just come one step closer to her death. Yes, her mother had tried to be stronger than she could be to spare Lucy and her father as much suffering as possible but in the end she hadn´t been able to spare them her death.

Yet Lucy believed that her mother indeed had been happy most of the time. She had been happy to see Lucy grow up, she had been happy to take care of her and to help her, she had been happy to see her smile but she had also known that her days were numbered and Lucy´s father had known so too.

Only Lucy had never seen the truth. Her mother had always protected her from this awareness too well but now she was no longer there to protect her and Lucy felt lonely and helpless. She had seen the small signs of the end but never understood their meaning. It was like watching the sunset with a smile on your face and not realizing the night was coming.

Lucy was grateful for all those beautiful years her mother had tried her best to enable her to live a carefree life but she also was sad she had never had a chance to say good bye.

Thinking of it she couldn´t remember to have said those words a single time. She had always used others. When she had gone to school in the morning and her mother had wished her "Have a nice day!" she had replied "I will." There was nothing wrong with it but she just had realized she hadn´t said good bye a single time.

Lucy sighed. She had changed so much in the past few weeks. She now knew things she wished she would have never had to learn. She felt so much older now and wished she could have stayed as naive as she had used to be for the rest of her life and she felt helpless and scared.

The little girl wiped her tears away and tried to open her red swollen eyes. "Good bye, mom. I´ll always remember you and I know you want me to be happy. I promise, I´ll learn to be again, just give me some time and I promise I´ll help dad to smile again." she spoke into the silence of the forest.


End file.
